Friday, August 7, 2009

meta: how I am keeping myself motivated

So, I have had blogs in the past, but I have never managed to stay interested in them. This time is different and the reason is simple: data. I turned on Google Analytics and I visit the graphs once or twice a day:

Just this little reassurance that people are looking at what I am writing is keeping the blog in my mind. Because it is in my mind, when something happens (like, say, my next article about my stupidity using split and ord) I remember to start writing stuff down.

No, it doesn't include RSS subscribers. I think feedburner or something does, but I haven't investigated it. I assume that there are more people out there reading the blog through RSS or have javascript/images/cookies turned off. It is just nice to know that anyone is looking at the posts.

It looks like FeedBurner does let you keep track of RSS stuff, but I doubt it will do me any good. Most of the traffic to this blog comes off of the Planet Perl Iron Man, and unless that feed pushes info back to FeedBurner I will get no statistics on it.

I dont use Google Analytics as much as i should but what i like about statcounter.com is :

- the "Recent Keyword Activity" not only list down google.com but also other search engine like yahoo.com- it also list out trafic link from other website in "Recent Came From"- there are also other stats like "Popular Pages", "Entry Pages" & "Exit Pages" which gives me an idea what my readers like to see- particularly there is a browser stats which comfort me that firefox is the majority browser which is used to view my web site ... :p

Some thing to take note though, statcounter.com free version only keep track of 500 log entries, then it will FIFO the logs.